So I've been following this for the past few days and I'm pretty intrigued. I'm wanting to try out some test trades for 1-2 BTC and see how it works out before trying to invest seriously into it ($200 max is the money I'm thinking of playing with at the moment). It's high enough of an investment to actually count for something, but low enough that if I completely bomb it's nothing more than a cost of a speeding ticket, which I make in about a week at work. So no huge loss.

Anyways the point of the topic:

What should I go with for trying out trading Bitcoins? Mt. Gox seems like the obvious choice because it so so large but a few things put me off of it:

1. Unstable website

2. Apparently a very long, several day turnaround to getting your money out from the first point you start selling. I hear it's the same when putting money into Mt. Gox to buy bitcoin - they say it takes several days for the money you sent to actually show up on your Gox account.

3. In order to desposit or withdraw you have to go through several confusing third party payment websites that Mt. Gox forces you to use versus a straight deposit. I thought the point of Bitcoin was that it was 100% peer to peer? These middlemen aren't something I want to be forced to deal with, especially since they are very obscure sounding middlement I've never heard of before.

Tradehill has the advantage of a referral commission system, which I honestly don't understand but they say on the forums it saves money so that's nice. They also have a wide variety of payment options that seem like they don't require you to go through a middleman like Dwolla and wait for several days for the funds to transfer.

But, the market is much smaller and currently buying Bitcoin is much cheaper on Mt. Gox than on Tradehill.

I'm not interested in mining as that is an uphill battle where only early investors reap the real rewards - unless you're some guy who wants to seriously drop $1.5k+ into a volitile unpredicatble market that will get harder and harder to mine as time goes on in order to generate 500BTC per month at the current moment.